If you have a website, performance and security should always be at the forefront of your mind. How quickly your website loads affects everything from your bounce rates to your conversion rates, revenue, user experience, and more. And security…well, having a malicious actor get access to your site is the worst nightmare scenario for most webmasters.

But while performance and security are essential, they can also be complicated and expensive to get right.

Accelerated Domains is a new service from Servebolt that can offer huge improvements to your site’s performance, scalability, and security without lifting a finger.

There’s no complex setup and no tweaking and tuning – you just add a few DNS records to your domain name and let Servebolt do the work to create a faster, more secure website.

In this post, we’ll introduce you to Servebolt Accelerated Domains, share how it can help your website, and tell you how you can try it out for yourself.

Let’s dig in.

What Is Servebolt Accelerated Domains?

Accelerated Domains is a new service from Servebolt that offers the following benefits:

• Improved performance around the globe, including for Google’s new Core Web Vitals metrics.
• Easier scalability to handle high-traffic situations (like going viral).
• Proactive security to block malicious threats before they happen.
• Bad bot blocking to cut down on spam and conserve resources.
• Reduced energy usage and carbon footprint.

The unique thing, though, is that Accelerated Domains is a “set it and forget it” service. To start using it, all you need to do is add a few DNS records to your domain name. Then, Accelerated Domains will handle the rest with a constantly improving set of features.

Accelerated Domains itself is built on a mix of Servebolt’s knowledge and optimizations and Cloudflare Enterprise. This includes Cloudflare’s huge global Enterprise network of 180+ points of presence, its enterprise-level security features, and more.

Normally, getting access to Cloudflare Enterprise would cost thousands of dollars, but Accelerated Domains gives you those same benefits at a much lower price point (more on pricing later).

Five Key Benefits of Using Accelerated Domains

Next, let’s go through the biggest benefits of using Servebolt Accelerated Domains.

1. Improved Performance

Accelerated Domains gives you a simple way to improve all of your site’s performance metrics, including the new Core Web Vitals metrics from Google.

By speeding up your site, you can:

• Create a better user experience for visitors.
• Lower your bounce rates.
• Improve your conversion rates, which boosts your revenue and gets you a better ROI on your ad spend.
• Set your site up for success in Google rankings, as Google will start using its Core Web Vitals metrics as an SEO ranking factor soon.

On average, Accelerated Domains can…

• Reduce load times by 45%.
• Shrink time to first byte (TTFB) by 60%.
• Reduce latency by 30%.

To achieve these performance optimizations, Accelerated Domains sits between visitors’ web browsers and your site’s origin server and works its magic. By doing this, Accelerated Domains is able to optimize your site’s code and how its assets are delivered, all while intelligently routing traffic to the most optimal location in Cloudflare Enterprise’s huge 180+ node network.

As much as possible, Accelerated Domains will cache your entire site across this network, which reduces latency and speeds up load times by letting visitors download content from the node that’s nearest to them. 

With dozens of nodes on every single continent, your visitors will enjoy faster load times no matter where they come from.

Of course, some WordPress sites (like WooCommerce stores) won’t be able to cache 100% of their content, but Accelerated Domains aims to cache as much as possible (while intelligently excluding content that can’t be cached to avoid issues, like your store’s shopping cart). For uncached hits, you’ll still be backed up by fast origin Servebolt hosting.

Via companion plugins for WordPress and other platforms, Servebolt can also automatically clear the cache when you publish or update content so that your visitors always see the right version of your site.

2. Simple Scalability

In addition to improving performance, the way that Accelerated Domains caches your site also makes it much simpler to scale your site.

Accelerated Domains is able to optimize your site’s cache hit-ratio to around 65% on average, which means almost two-thirds of your site’s visits don’t need to touch your origin server. 

By cutting the work of your origin server by more than half, it will be much easier to scale your site in high-traffic situations and you won’t need to upgrade to pricey new hosting plans just to handle spikes.

Your site will also seamlessly scale – so there’s no more panic that your server will go offline during a server spike.

3. Proactive Security

Beyond performance and scalability, Accelerated Domains can also proactively protect your site by blocking malicious threats before they happen.

Accelerated Domains sits in front of your server, which means that it can stop malicious traffic before it hits your application (e.g. WordPress).

You’ll get:

• A managed web application firewall (WAF) with regularly updated rules based on analysis from Servebolt and Cloudflare. Includes rules to mitigate OWASP Top 10 threats and also block vulnerabilities specific to WordPress and other platforms.
• Automatic DDoS protection.
• Rate limiting to protect from brute force attacks.
• Automatic SSL via Digicert, which means you don’t need to purchase your own SSL certificate or mess with setting up Let’s Encrypt.

The security rules are based on Servebolt’s hands-on expertise and knowledge as well as data from Cloudflare’s network, which handles close to 40% of all HTTP traffic on the Internet.

4. Bad Bot Blocking

Spam is a real problem on the Internet, especially if you’re using WordPress because WordPress’s popularity makes it a juicy target for spammers. 

With Accelerated Domains, you’re able to seamlessly filter out bad bots without affecting your human visitors or blocking good bots (like Googlebot coming to index your content).

Accelerated Domains uses behavioral analysis and machine learning based on Servebolt’s and Cloudflare’s data so that it’s able to get better and better at blocking bad bots without affecting the traffic you do want.

5. Reduced Carbon Footprint

All the benefits above can also reduce the carbon footprint of your website, which helps create a greener web.

By intelligently caching your site around the world and reducing latency, Accelerated Domains reduces the processing needs of your server and shortens the distance that data needs to travel, which cuts down on energy usage.

And by blocking bad bots before they hit your server and application, Accelerated Domains can also stop your server from wasting energy serving content to bad bots.

Accelerated Domains Pricing

Now for the important question – how much is all this going to cost you?

Well, Cloudflare Enterprise, which is part of what Accelerated Domains gives you access to, would usually cost you over $5,000 per month just by itself.

With Accelerated Domains, though, you can get access to those same Cloudflare Enterprise features for a fraction of the price, not to mention all the other optimizations that Servebolt makes. 

You’ll pay just $149 per month for use on one domain name and 1 TB of bandwidth, which is plenty of bandwidth for most websites.

To add more domains or bandwidth, you can pay:

• $49 per extra domain name
• $99 per extra 1 GB of bandwidth

How to Get Started With Accelerated Domains

If you want to try out Accelerated Domains for yourself, here’s how you can do it.

Move to Servebolt Hosting (If You Aren’t Hosting There Already)

First off, Accelerated Domains is only available if you’re hosting your site(s) with Servebolt. If you’re not already hosting with Servebolt, your first step is to start doing so.

Servebolt offers a free trial, so you can sign up and test it out without needing to pay anything.

Servebolt can also help you migrate your site for free – all you need to do is fill out a migration form to give them the details that they need.

Set Up Accelerated Domains

Once you’re hosting on Servebolt, you can order Accelerated Domains through your Servebolt Control Panel.

The setup process only takes a few seconds – all you need to do is add a couple of DNS records and Accelerated Domains handles the rest – it’s pretty much set-it-and-forget-it.

To get started, use the buttons below: